Jagadis Bose’s engagement with the automata tradition

Jagadis Chandra Bose was a prolific inventor of elegant and delicate scientific instruments, especially ones deployed in his plant-physiological investigations. These instruments were a manifestation of his mechanistic mentality. But Bose’s instruments went further. They were automatic machines and, thus, manifested his engagement over a quarter-century with the automata tradition– a tradition reaching back to antiquity– entailing mechanisms that, once set into motion, performed their intended task without further human intervention. The purpose of this paper is to examine, by way of his instruments, Bose’s engagement with the automata tradition, both in terms of actual physical automata and abstract automata (in the form of mental schemas).